Greetings from the Press Corps! This is hopefully the first post of a continued effort to increase transparency and showcase what the development team has been working on. As this is the first of these posts, I have included summaries of the previous meetings we have attended in chronological order. Please note: These are not all of the topics that were discussed, only the highlights that are relevant. Work flow change discussions for instance, I have omitted.Please ask any questions here or via discord with @Press Corps, we will be around to answer them.In the future, these should be posted with the Weekly Dev Blogs release.

-- 7/25 --Extensive discussion around balance of current BVB mechanics including solutions to sun tanking and recent (as of then) perm drone changes.The place of Shield Monkey within the classes was also brought up along with possible avenues to help it become less niche.

-- 8/1 --This meeting built on the BVB discussion form the previous Tuesday, finalizing many of the same ideas, primarily agro.I'm going to go into a little more detail on the agro changes as this is what will have a larger impact on overall BVB.

Bases will prefer to target:

Other Bases - Highest priority

Perm Drones - Second highest

Players - If no other targets

These priorities apply to both transference and damage. If the station runs out of other targets and switches to players, it will target those with the highest hostility.

Perm drones will prefer to target:

Players - Highest priority

Other Perm Drones - Second highest

Bases - If no other targets

This new code is on test, but there are a lot of edge cases that are hard to catch before it goes live, so it may be on there for a while. If you want to help get it live, make sure to check it out on the test server and give feedback.

-- 8/15 --Further development around BVB. Expect more mechanics to allow player participation, e.g. Unidyne to come.Report and discussion on the results of the shield changes that were put on test.Lengthy discourse on class meta.

-- 8/22 --I missed this meeting due to a very very long drive, perhaps another press corps member could write a summery?

-- 8/29 --Mainly a long conversation about the direction to take engineer balance, primarily drone ops. I won't detail this here as it is continued into the 9/5 meeting.There was also some talk about the balance of subspace bosses, Hermes, and the T22 light fighters (Phoenix and Glaucopennia) that were on test the previous week.

-- 9/5 -- Finally, this week's (9/5) meeting:A consensus was reached in the direction to take engineer balance, specifically ops. The base stats of drones will be buffed, reducing their reliance on the class skills and weighted bonuses of engi, while raising the incentive for other classes to use drones as well. To counteract this change, general drone ops will have less of an impact. Drone controllers, however, will become more effective. This should help bring engi back to its focus on adaptation.Improvements to dying were also brought up, so you won't end up stranded from your ship in a pod or spirit.Some ships with low weapon slots e.g. Mzungu Disk will get more as to raise availability to berserkers.Expect Kalthi user ships to not be obtainable via AI purchase, but from blueprints instead. These won't be too challenging to build, and are primarily to encourage interaction with the zone.

Thanks for the writeup, Faranight. I just want to add two clarifications.

1) The base targeting code revamp that is on the test server presumes the creation of some new mobile permanent drones, and the introduction of offensive drone slots for BvB. The idea is that you would be able to use permanent drones to shield your ships from base aggro (and these new drones would be pretty tanky).

2) The drone ops revamp was indeed agreed upon, but we also agreed that we will first make a new balance sheet for drones (there isn't one, currently) so that we can be more clear on which drones are underpowered and overpowered.

_________________Hi, I'm Anil, a long-time player turned developer. I am Star Sonata's lead content developer, which means that I run weekly dev meetings and make sure that any proposed changes to the game receive proper review before going live.

Hi, while we met last week we didn't have any projects close enough to completion to report. I expect to have a blog post after tonight's meeting.

_________________Hi, I'm Anil, a long-time player turned developer. I am Star Sonata's lead content developer, which means that I run weekly dev meetings and make sure that any proposed changes to the game receive proper review before going live.

Thanks for the response. I would honestly like to see even "Hober continued to mull over further nerfs" or the like. Even if there were no real updates. Or change the name to "Semi-Weekly Dev Blog". Just so that everyone is on the same page.

If it seems bad form to spam the homepage with updates of "nothing really happened", could we have a monthly post on the homepage and have more fine-grained updates in this forum?

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